Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Average IQs and Below-Average Jobs

The average IQ in the United States is 100. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re talking about mean or median average; either way, it means one-half of the people in the U.S. have IQs below 100, and the other half has IQs above 100.

About five percent of all people in the U.S. have IQs of 125 and above. Less than ten percent have IQs above 120, which is the cut-off point for “very bright.” Before the days of Political Correctness, those with IQs 85 and below were called "morons" (Muhammed Ali scored 78 on a military IQ test - and even his best friends claimed he was a moron).

What does all of this mean? Nothing good for the vast majority of people, which means nothing good for the United States.

As the political scientist Kevin Phillips has pointed out in several of his books, great countries go though three phases: agricultural, industrial, then in decline they develop financial industries. Actually, countries are already in decline when they enter that last phase.

Phillips used the now-gone empires of Spain, Holland and England as examples. All went though all three phases then collapsed. These days, he writes about the United States – which mired deep in its financial bog is in decline.

If this decline isn’t bad enough, it’s made worse by the exporting of our highly-paid industrial jobs, which the feds encourage because they delude themselves they’ll be replaced by better financial or service (“Do you want fries with that?”) jobs. Which they’re not, and won’t be.

Many of these now-gone jobs didn’t require high IQs to do them. You don’t have to have an IQ of 120 to work in a steel mill or on an auto-assembly line. In fact such an IQ would be a detriment in such jobs due to boredom.

Those high-paying jobs requiring average IQs are now gone. What’s left for these people? Jobs paying minimum-wage or slightly above. Either that, or welfare. Or crime (the average IQ of those in prison is 93).

The United States is stratifying itself by IQ. We’re going to end up without much of a blue-collar middle-class since their jobs are being outsourced. We’re going to end up with a poorly-paid lower-class partly supported by marginal welfare payments and a highly-paid upper class with higher IQs, who are partly supporting the lower classes through transfer payments.

I’ll give one example of what happens when the middle-class collapses: in Germany the Nazis were bought to power by the economically-ravaged middle class. You can fill in the blanks about our future (it won’t involve Nazis, contrary to the hallucinations of leftists).

Liberals, who delude themselves human nature is completely plastic, claim IQ can be raised substantially. How they think someone with an IQ of 85 can raise it to 125 is beyond me, but then, I’m not a leftist, all of whom are about four years old emotionally.

Your IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 12 years old. It can go up and down a little bit but it’s not going to go up and down by 20 points. There is no way to make it go up 20 points, and barring some major neurological insult, it can't drop 20 points, either.

Education does help in developing what IQ a person has, but the public schools haven’t done that for a long time, not with a 50% drop-out rate. It’s got to the point where if you have a lot of money you can get a fairly decent education but if you don’t have money these days you can’t even go to college unless you go into debt $30,000 – and sometimes a lot more.

One of the things that the financial “elites” do is what to flood the country with low-IQ illegal immigrants. Why? To drive down wages, which means more money for the elites. The fact that many “libertarians” are too blind and ignorant to realize that by supporting open borders they are cutting their own throats – and that of the nation – would be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic.

This stratification into socio-economic classes won’t last, since the financial phase never lasts. If whatever administration that is in power had any sense, it would set up laws to reindustrialize the U.S. It wouldn’t be that hard.

Only making things produces wealth. Shuffling “money” around is not wealth; for that matter, money is not wealth. Gold and silver are not wealth. Agriculture is wealth; manufacturing is wealth; a financial economy is an economy on its way down and out.

To use Thom Hartmann’s phase, we need to reboot the country. That rebooting would in many ways take us back to the past, to ideas that worked for decades. The ideas of today are not working; they are destructive.

The financial “elites,” for all their vaunted high IQs (which doesn’t have much of anything to do with wisdom or even common sense) are extraordinarily short-sighted. They won’t change their policies until there is revolt.